The dominant winter colors of the Great Swamp are nature's muted neutrals.

The browns of bare bark and dormant swamp grass; the grays of acres of ice and the pools of surface swamp water that reflect winter's leaden skies. The remaining stubborn leaves of verdant spring and vibrant fall are now shriveled and brittle, the only color left in them a dead-bone brown.

The dominant winter sound in the Great Swamp is silence.

Now and then, lonely boot-heel footsteps are heard on the boardwalks that lead to the bird blinds. The ice cracks in snaps of earthbound thunder that echo through the swamp like the whistles and caws of summer birds as they call to one another.

In flight is a great blue heron, flat and gray against dark, cloudy skies; Canada geese in their high-flying wedge; American crows in their short hops from tree to tree. Closer to the ground, two Eastern bluebirds flirt with one another, chasing close in flight like mini-fighter jets.

And to think . . . all of this could have been another Newark International Airport.

Forty years ago, in 1959, the Port Authority was looking to follow a national trend of building major airport hubs greater distances from the cities they served. The reason was simple enough.

Land.

Commercial air travel, which barely existed before World War II, was exploding. War technology had made planes safer, and hundreds of thousands of American soldiers had experienced the convenience of flight.

The fledgling airline industry of Charles Lindbergh and Trans World Airways was leaving its uncomfortable teen years behind and entering adulthood. The airlines needed bigger airports.

The postwar years were an era of unprecedented ground travel, too. The Federal Highway Act of Dwight Eisenhower was finally funding plans for interstate highways that had been on the drawing boards for years.

Two of these in New Jersey were Routes 78 and 287.

They would intersect not far from the Great Swamp, making the new airport convenient for New Yorkers and Jerseyans, as well as people from eastern Pennsylvania. The Port Authority thought the swamp was perfect for other reasons, too.

It already was flat -- and sparsely populated. The small towns around it -- the Chathams, Bernards Township, Madison, Harding -- probably couldn't raise much political opposition and would welcome the influx of jobs and industry.

The Port Authority promised jobs -- 80,000, to be exact. In a detailed proposal, it predicted those jobs would support 3,400 stores and eateries.

The quiet, rolling hills of northern Somerset and southern Morris County and their small villages, such as New Vernon, Basking Ridge, Liberty Corner and Green Village, would be transformed into modern American suburbs, like those in the Dallas-Fort Worth corridor.

Well, the Port Authority was right about it being flat. But it underestimated the power of the relatively few people who lived there. And it way overestimated the area's interest in becoming an airport destination.

See, lifestyle is far more valuable to many people than commerce and expansion. They fight to protect their way of life, and that is exactly what happened at the Great Swamp.

Because at the very time the government was expanding air travel and car travel and legislating its vision of expanding suburbia through favorable lending laws for new home purchases, the environmental movement also was forming as a protection against the Levittowning of America.

On Dec. 10, 1959, a Star-Ledger story proclaimed "an explosion of violent proportions is simmering in Morris County."

Mixed metaphor aside, the story was about how opposition to the Swamp airport was large and vocal. At Madison High School, just a week before Christmas, 1,500 residents packed the gym and vowed to fight the project. There were two arms of the movement. One was legislative, the other homegrown.

The late Helen Fenske, a self-described Green Village housewife, began to put together a coalition of fundraising volunteers to buy up the land and deed it to the U.S. Department of the Interior for a nature preserve. This was 1960, decades before the discovery that a rare salamander could stop a huge development in its tracks.

Still, the local, newly aligned environmentalists made a case for the birds, waterfowl and amphibians that called the Great Swamp home.

They enlisted the help of Marcellus Hartley Dodge and his wife, Geraldine, a legend among animal lovers. With Dodge startup money, wealth built from Remington firearms, the group began to purchase tracts of Great Swamp land. But they also raised money in small donations from regular people.

By 1960, they had 1,000 acres. By 1964, they had more than 3,000, which met federal requirements to create a wildlife refuge.

On May 29, 1964, the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge became the first federally designated wilderness area east of the Mississippi.

By then, the Port Authority had decided to move on and expand Newark Airport into what it is today.

Where the Port Authority saw huge terminals, 2-mile runways and long-term parking lots, there are bird blinds, boardwalks and 9,400 acres of wetlands. Instead of commercial jet fueling tanks, there are bird feeders.

You get the idea.

But the story of the Great Swamp didn't end there.

Like the airline industry, the environmental movement in New Jersey took off. The little Great Swamp Committee of 1960 grew and evolved into the formidable New Jersey Conservation Foundation, which extended its vision of greenways for all of New Jersey.

The nonprofit group has helped preserve 100,000 acres of farm and forest, and urban parks. It has been a force behind every sweeping green initiative in the state, most notably protection of the Pine Barrens and the Highlands.

But it also never forgets its small roots. And so on its list of accomplishments are little places like the Celery Farm Natural Area in Allendale, the Dismal-Harmony Reserve in Mendham Township and Grover's Mill Pond in West Windsor Township, where Orson Welles landed his Martians in the 1938 "War of the Worlds" broadcast.

All places where you can walk alone, breathe fresh air and enjoy the quiet.